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Donations for OSS ATI driver

02-22-2011, 08:48 PM

I really appreciate the hard work that's gone into the Open ATI driver. I made my decision to purchase a new ATI card because of this, but know my 1 ~$200 card is peanuts to ATI and probably nothing from that is going directly to the devs that actually did the work. Is there a Donate button anywhere for radeon development?

The problem with donation is this:
it is bad stereotype, but it is present everywhere. It is also much better, to pay and get with optional "accelerate". Pay and get means you go to market and buy and it works already, and you know part of your payed goes to development; or you pay for function together with other people and developers get in and solve for collective "prize". But if you donate, it sounds like you beg to normal Joe.
Or replace word "donate" with "invest" and you are done.

And this:

Consider 1000 people that buy card and get windows driver payed from it and 1000 people that too get card and pay additional money for linux driver. Windows driver receives 2000 raw, Linux driver 1000 - even if only 1000 want it really.

Any other cases make it a hobby driver. Sorry for telling the naked truth.

Comment

Consider 1000 people that buy card and get windows driver payed from it and 1000 people that too get card and pay additional money for linux driver. Windows driver receives 2000 raw, Linux driver 1000 - even if only 1000 want it really.

Any other cases make it a hobby driver. Sorry for telling the naked truth.

Your "naked truth" only works if Linux market share for consumer PC is 50% rather than the more generally accepted 1-1.5%.

Another way to describe the situation would be that 1000 people buy windows, 15 people buy Linux, but expect the same driver investment on both. That may not be exactly right either but it's probably closer than your "truth".

Proprietary drivers make it possible to come a lot closer to matching functionality and performance (by sharing code across multiple OSes) even though the market shares are very different.

Comment

2. Another way to describe the situation would be that 1000 people buy windows, 15 people buy Linux.

3. Proprietary drivers make it possible to come a lot closer to matching functionality and performance (by sharing code across multiple OSes) even though the market shares are very different.

1. 1-1.5% is a bit understimated but is true there is no real way to get real statistics about linux since there isn't a single vendor to handle them or oem preinstallation's that someone can use

2. people don't buy linux they download it or get it for free at www.thedistroyouuse.org or it comes without cost with the hardware in some cases (excepting redhat/novell for workstations and servers)

beside many ppl like my father buy his ultimate bad ass laptop wich there is no way to buy in store without win7 preloaded (and included in the price btw!!) and give it to me or the nearest geek to remove that junk an put a real OS on it but if you think about it my father's buy still count as a windows 7 buy and not as a linux install, so you wrongly count my father as a windows customer when in reality he is a linux user (it took me a year to convince him but now he is a linux evangelist with all his friends and a newborn win hater) for the curious yes my father buy nvidia laptop's only cuz i adviced him that but im thinking for a fusion laptop cuz the OSS drivers are actually perfect for his type of work now and i don't have to shoot myself in the foot installing that software bug named fglrx.

so nVidia unlike AMD count potencial customer's like my dad and try to provide a nice driver so they can keep market share secured, plus is a nice market strategy to show your users that no matter the OS you choose to use, nVidia is there to give you proper support (i would welcome a bit more OSS friendlyness but at least the blob works).

3. well fglrx is for your only market share left in the unix world, wich is some workstations of some left behind company's that still haven't tested Quadro cards, beside if you measure the driver quality based on the market share of your product's after seeing fglrx i assume nVidia should be kicking the sunny days out of you in market share whatever the OS cuz opengl in catalyst or fglrx suck really hard with slowness and bugs.

another thing you aren't counting here are the geek's that care about support and drivers, ofc you can say that we geek are less than 0.1% of the market share but hey when a geek say to some potential AMD customer (aka average joe asking what to buy for his new work computer) don't buy AMD cuz their driver suck and you are tied to use only windows (i don't even count fglrx working here for an average joe cuz is nonsense) they take it like the word of god itself and eventually they tell to their friends too wich follow the same advice like lambs (i recommend AMD CPU's cuz their are great for the buck this is only about GPU's). so eventually that 0.1% geek market share give magically a bunch more times market share to nVidia cuz the domino effect no matter the OS cuz if it is true that many of those ppl don't or won't use linux in a near future, they feel like spending money is something that won't be supported in the eventual case of an OS switch having another option in market that will work is a bad investment.(ask nokia shareholders after hearing symbian death sentence)

on the good side once r600g gets default with mesa 7.11 in natty or next ubuntu ill recomend to my clients and friends the use of AMD gpu's again cuz for normal office use r600g kick the sunny days out of fglrx and is clean, light, stable, damn freaking fast in 2d and 3d eyecandy, awesome for playing up 720p videos and is trully out of the box magic. so at the end of the day the decision of releasing docs to the community will get you more users than the famous shared source bug named fglrx

my point been that AMD should not been so stiff and square minded assuming market shares here and there cuz is way to changing and varying and ask yourself if the market share is so low and we know that nvidia isn't famous for loving give money away, why they put so much effort on it?

so maybe AMD need to refresh their marketing department's (well AMD marketing department has never been the brightess light bulb of the box to begin with ....)

Comment

Even though the Linux desktop market share is low, its users should not be valued primarily on numbers.

Take for example hardware enthusiast websites and the tech press, which are only now waking up to the pains of Linux users. There are only a handful sites, yet they are extensively catered for by hardware manufacturers.

Similar to them, Linux users are typically more tech-savvy than the average. Winning over a Linux user will have a multiplier effect on the group of people who listen to him for purchasing decisions.

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Your "naked truth" only works if Linux market share for consumer PC is 50% rather than the more generally accepted 1-1.5%.

Another way to describe the situation would be that 1000 people buy windows, 15 people buy Linux, but expect the same driver investment on both. That may not be exactly right either but it's probably closer than your "truth".

Proprietary drivers make it possible to come a lot closer to matching functionality and performance (by sharing code across multiple OSes) even though the market shares are very different.

Well, why do 1000 buy windows with amd card? Where are better drivers? Which OS has more development possibilites? And why windows becomes 1015 "donations"?

I assume, for reason it was left unanswered, from every single amd card there is a percentage for windows driver team for desktop card. There is fglrx via firegl and some time they drop an eye on current issues with it on desktop. And there is opensource team that is completely unglued to purchased cards.

Then the only valid options for opensource driver left are external support: donation model, subscription model, bug headhunt model, optional extra payment model. All thouse models are not bound to hardware - which means windows driver will always progress better than linux (or any other OS) driver.

Ask any Joe on the street, why he does not use linux for gaming? Absence of games and bad drivers. Is OS itself bad? No, it is actually much less fuzz. Why there are more games? Because... microsoft bribes development studios and you guys develop 3D on proprietary (read not yours) stack. If DirectX is considered de-facto standard for 3D it *must* be set completely open. Otherwise, there is no "personal" computer for graphics anymore - there is "windows computer" with AMD card.

I think I found the tail of the circle snake. I clearly remember that hw accelerated cards emerged earlier than games capable of using that acceleration.

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If you ask any Joe on the street, the vast majority of folks will say "what's Linux?"

This is a chicken and egg problem, but as we've said before, we can't justify lots of head count on the open source driver without some demonstrable demand. A handful of users saying they run Linux is not going to change things. You need to get big OEMs to demand open source drivers with features X, Y, and Z if you want to see them show up in the open source driver quickly.

With the closed source driver most of the code can be shared across OSes (Windows, Linux, etc.) and products (consumer and FirePro). So it doesn't really matter whether the cards we sell are consumer or firepro cards; it's all the same pot.

One reason windows works much better for a lot of graphics related things and why a lot of developers develop for DirectX is that Microsoft puts a huge amount of developer time and money into developing a first rate graphics infrastructure that supports all the features users and developers want in a first class graphics stack. Who's going to do that work on Linux?